Madeleine Reddon

Assistant Professor

I study 20^th and 21^st century Indigenous literature in relation to global and modernist avant-garde traditions. My research and teaching are guided by anti-colonial and decolonial reading practices. I ask how the disciplinary apparatus of literary studies reproduces colonial knowledge production and turn to the literary archive as a repository for alternative models of reading and interrelation.

My current book project, Enigmatic Inheritances, is a comparative and interdisciplinary project that draws Indigenous experimental writing into a history of the global avant-garde. I am particularly interested in literature that explores the intergenerational experience of dispossession and the persistence of kinship despite collective experiences of genocide, enslavement, and dispossession. Working alongside Indigenous literary nationalisms, which insist that we must first understand Indigenous epistemological, political, cultural, linguistic, and spiritual contexts to read Indigenous literature, my research seeks to develop sensitive and capacious methods for reading Indigenous literature concerned with the interruption or perceived loss of such contexts.

I am also a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, born and raised in Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton, Canada.

Education

BA Honours, English Literature, University of Alberta (2012)
MA, English Literature, University of British Columbia (2015)
PhD, English Literature, University of British Columbia (2022)

Research Interests

Indigenous Literature, 1890 to the present
Global modernist and avant-garde literatures
Psychoanalysis
Indigenous Studies
Indigenous and Black Feminisms
Postcolonial and Cultural Studies
Anticolonial Thought
Critical Theory

Publications/Research Listings

Academic Research:

“Turned in and Away: The Convolutions of Impossible Incorporation in the Narratives of Chester Himes,” Philosophies, 9, no. 2, April 9, 2024.
“Paranormal Encounters: Notes on Indigenous Horror,” Global Horror Film: Trauma, Borders, and Shifting Visions, Samirah Alkassim and Ziad Foty, Cognella Press, in press 2023.
“Indigenous Modernism: Dehabituating Reading Practices,” Canada and Beyond, Special Issue: Counterclockwise, Vol. 8, (2019) pp. 10-20.

Editorial:

Co-edited with Renae Watchman. “Indigenous Literary Biography,” special issue of Canadian Literature, 263 and vol. 263.
Co-edited with Jordan Abel and Carleigh Baker. Carving Space: Indigenous Voices Awards Anthology. Penguin Books, June 2023.

Public Writing:

Art reviews for the Canadian arts magazine Rungh